Post-Modern Happenings
Post-Modern Happenings
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: Sunday Globe Leisure, June 02, 1991
MANKIND needs its artists like a garden needs rain. Without artists, the world would have no music, no pictures, no books, no movies nor television nor dancing girls nor anything even remotely civilized. Without artists to seduce his thoughts, man would overpopulate the earth and make the somnists very unhappy. He would relish war as a pastime and pay to watch the slaughter. He would suffocate his institutions, his environment, and ultimately himself.
But art is more than a diversion. It is the heartbeat of a flourishing culture, the song of the wind in the trees. Every golden age of man has brought with it a flowering of the arts - the hum, the steady pounding of painters painting, dancers dancing, and poets under every tree.
Like deer in the forest, artists can sense when the harvests are fullest, when the grain is ripe and the spirits are buoyant with song and wine. Drawn to the cities from hidden wellsprings, they come, cautiously at first, to feed from man’s outstretched palms like babes of the wilderness. If they sense danger, they withdraw quickly. If they stay on, they make their homes among the people and give of themselves... and their magic.
Not every upsurge of artistic activity heralds a golden age, though. Some of them precede catastrophe, war and revolution. Although their sixth sense is accurate (art is intuition and sorcery), artists seem unable to distinguish windfall from war. When artists come in droves from the wilderness, we can be certain only that the winds of change are blowing. For better or worse.
You can feel it. You can feel it even now. Our artists are beginning to awaken and the wind is in the trees. In the galleries, they have begun to exorcise the old icons that have imprisoned them for years. They have taken their talk out of the coffee shops and into the light of day, into the streets where people are gathering to listen. They are ambushing us in our schools, our shopping malls, our parks and nightclubs. Like Hitchcock’s birds, the artists are gathering on our rooftops.
Last Saturday was another red letter day for art's urban guerrillas. Even the vendors at the Luneta, dazed with the heat, could feel the energy mounting as painters, poets, musicians and dangers converged at the park for a day of celebration and gloriously wanton behavior. As far away as the Quirino Grandstand, people knew there was a party in that shaded clearing behind the National Library. The artists had come out of hiding.
The project began, precariously enough, as the offshoot of an art exhibit by the Remedios Circle, an alliance of well-known painters based at the Penguin Cafe in Malate. The group was presenting a show called "Indoors/Outdoors" at the new Kanlungan Ng Sining gallery at the Rizal Park. Someone had suggested to the artists that they paint some 30 lampposts that pockmarked the area of the facility like a bad rash. The lampposts were spooky, cast out of solid concrete in the shape of giant crosses, and the area could certainly use the facelift. Rock Drilon, project director of Kanlungan and himself a member of the Remedios Circle, saw the activity as a terrific vehicle for drumming up attention for his new gallery. He jumped in with both feet.
With two fingers and a typewriter, Rock dashed off letters to artists from the various disciplines, to the media, to galleries and other potential sponsors. Within a week, the stage was set for a major "art event" at the Luneta. The spirit of Woodstock was alive and kicking.
The Baguio artists showed up in full force, looking like tribal hooligans capable of devouring your liver. Ballet Philippines did a cheerleaders’ dance to Orville Tiamson’s delicious synthesizer music. Children painted “on the spot”, ogled the performers onstage, and exchanged hand-signals with the deafmute waiters nearby. PLAC poets Yuson, De Ungria, Sunico and Luigi Francia peppered the air with kisses and profanity. Pepito Bosch, high priest of the underground, gurgled on the microphone and pissed on the bushes. Virgie Moreno sat on the grass for the first time in years. The muse was giddy and naked that day.
Other artists did site-specific installations in the garden. Robert Villanueva wove slender reeds into a spatial dissection of nature-inspired symmetry and harmony. Nestor Vinluan planted a tall field of multi-colored twigs anchored to a spiral of painted round boulders. Kidlat Tahimik cloathed television screens in native baskets and suspended them from a tree. Someone else made a bamboo sitework to shade a gingerbread man of leaves and white stones. Other artists were as busy as bees, their hands caked with paint and mud, their auras electric. A hat was passed around for more beer. Robert Lape of Galeria de las Islas sent a box of food. Silvana Diaz took home-movies.
The lampposts, too, got painted-and what a sight they were! With more artists than posts, collaborations by four or more artists gave rise to multi-faceted fantasies ranging from the trashy to the transcendental.
The lamppost-paintings of Phyllis Zaballero, Albor, Susan Stair, Vinluan, Pablo Orendain and Jonathan Salvosa, in particular, are so tempting as genuine works of art, that I plan to steal them when I get the chance.
Amidst the magic and the delirium, a sense of true camaraderie was fostered. This is the same spirit that gave rise to some of the most influential movements in the history of art, movements perpetrated by artists who were revolting in fun. Once planted, the seed grows and blossoms. And more often than not, there is no stopping it.
Someone said the happening was such fun that even Rizal was smiling. I looked; he was. He must have heard Pepito.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Post-Modern Happenings” (page 1 of 1), Sunday Globe Leisure, June 02, 1991
